If that’s true, and I believe it is, we have to really think about how we share, how we make our requests, and about what Dr. Stephen R. Covey called the “emotional bank account?” How can we share information beyond the first person? Let’s talk about the hand-carried letter.

The Hand-Carried Letter

In some ways, as we’ve shifted to this ubiquitous distribution world, where I can be a video maker, a radio host, a newspaper, a book, and a public speaker all from my couch, something else shifted as well. In a world where everyone can distribute information, that means there’s lots more information. That means data at Jackson Pollock velocity. Too much too read means much more goes unread.

We need “the hand-carried letter.”

A hand-carried letter means to me that the person choosing to share information with me believes in what she is sharing, and believes that it’s something I want to know about.

Think about the mail in your inbox (or clogging your social channels). Think about the mail you’re sending. Can you say this about the information you’re choosing to share?

Sharing and The Tax on Friendship

As time passes, we rely on our friends to vet and share information. Let’s use “friends” to include business colleagues, online personalities we’ve come to trust (me?), and others who we believe to have a handle on things. We look to these people for information that has already been considered once.

Example: I learn about the real time web from Louis Gray. I don’t even bother reading about it from other sources any more. When PR people send me info that seems like something Louis will cover, I either tell them to see Louis, or I delete and wait for Louis to cover it.

Example: I learn about interesting, thought-provoking books from Whitney Hoffman and Ann and Michael. I might or might not get other sources for this, but I trust the hand-carried letter of what Whitney and Ann and Michael are sharing.

But what about when people need something to travel far? Lots of us seem to have causes and needs and businesses to promote online. We have things we think are important, but sharing this information and spreading it requires that we find people who think it’s interesting enough to hand-carry to their audiences, their communities, their constituent masses.

Asking our friends to share things is a tax. If every person alive has what Dr. Stephen R. Covey calls an “emotional bank account” between us, this asking requires a small withdrawal. If things are going well between two people, and/or if the “ask” isn’t too big, this tax is small. But what if someone starts asking you to share every little thing all the time? Or, what if the person asking doesn’t really have much stored up in the emotional bank account between you? Just because you *can* reach me via email or Twitter doesn’t mean I support your causes. Right? How does your multiple asking tax those loosely-joined friendships? It taxes them at a much higher rate, is the answer.

It adds up quickly.

Ensuring Prompt Delivery

Thus, in this environment, we have to do several things, if we’re to rely on friends and loosely-joined connections to deliver hand-carried letters for us.

• Give much more frequently than you ask. This gives others a better feeling about who you are and what you do for the space at large.
• Share without being asked, when you consider information good. This builds up points in one’s emotional bank account (we talk about this in our pending book, Trust Agents, by the way).
• Make the requests simple, infrequent, and brief. (If you make it hard for me to share, why should I?)
• Ask only when you need it most. Asking others to share every little thing taxes the relationship.
• Don’t seek hand-carried letter service if you’re really intending a mass-mail message.
• Build your information such that it’s “hand-carried” friendly (brief, portable, shareable, addressable (with a URL).
• Thank people for sharing, as often as you can.

What’s Your Take?

Does this resonate? How do you see the information sharing world changing? What does this mean for you or your business?

Photo Credit the consumerist

I’ve recently started using BrightKite again, specifically because of the iPhone application. The application is reasonably simple: map your GPS coordinates to a specific location and then allow you to annotate that area with text or a photo. So, I can be visiting a place like St. Petersburg, Florida, and I can check in. I might take a snap of the hotel where I’m staying, and I might add a note like “the coffee here is horrible, but there’s a Dunkin Donuts a few blocks west.”

Someone else in the area who is using the same application might now see this update and realize two things (depending on my privacy settings): 1.) I’m nearby. 2.) That the coffee at the hotel stinks. In both cases, this information is only available through the use of this software.

But it’s like glyphs. There’s a whole sense of meta information that is passing between people that you might not know is there. (William Gibson covers this beautifully in the not-science-fiction book, Spook Country.)

How Does This Impact You?

Services like Twitter and FriendFeed and Flickr and Facebook and LinkedIn and more are hosting conversations around you that might be of value to you. You can’t always tune in, but if you don’t even opt to build a PORTAL into these areas so that you can learn what’s being said, you’re missing out on information that might add to your business needs.

If you’re not using services like Yelp and BrightKite, (and you could name several others), you’re missing some of the glyphs and warnings we’re leaving on the landscape to tell you about the way things are versus the way things are marketed. You’re missing chance encounters. You’re missing stray opportunities.

Again, you don’t have to get involved. It’s just that we are, and we’re passing many more notes than you can imagine.

Participating in the Annotated World

There are many projects here. There are many ways to add to this body of work. If you think about it, we are helping a web of human information exist and think. We are directing warm information to where it’s needed when it’s needed without a core leader. It’s quite a project, if you think about it.

Here are some ways to feed the network:

• When you’re somewhere new, snap photos and post them to Flickr.
• Take photos of people at events and post the good ones. Add their names and companies to them.
• When you post photos in Flickr, when you can, add contextual information about where.
• Write reviews for places and services in Yelp.
• Use Twitter at conferences.
• Add hash tags to events. (We used #nms08 at the New Marketing Summit. It just means type #SOMETHING at some point in your twitter post for tracking purposes.)
• Add hash tags to specific presentations if you think Twitter will enhance it.
• Provide information about places. I tweet traffic jams.
• Build human networks to feed information through. Find people who share like interests. (There are 40 groups listed on Facebook for “cartographers.”)
• Participate in wikis and shared information building projects. The rewards of such projects are better community. (Look at what Colin Browning has started at Constructing Social as a tool for mapping social media resources, for instance.)
• Share the good stuff. When you see great blog posts, tweet about them, reblog them, pop them up into Delicious and StumbleUpon so that people might see them and benefit from them later. For instance, I’m collecting social media case studies. I’d love more of those. When you find them, and if you use Delicious. just add a tag that says: for:chrisbrogan , with the colon in there. Pow. It lands in my box and I can add it to the file.

There are conversations – rich dialogues and information sharing experiences – happening with or without you. Several of them have business value. Many can impact your life. Get in the habit of using Twitter Search to find out about places and events and people before you visit. You’d be amazed what you turn up.

Is this making sense? Do you get where I’m coming from? Are you already participating? Or does this scare the poo out of you to consider?

This is related but not. It’s a fascinating book worth checking out of your library:

Thanks for your thoughts. Trust agents are attuned to these glyphs. I just want to share the premise out further.

Photo credit, CosmoPolitician

Recent news about a CNN iReport citizen journalist inaccurately reported that Apple CEO Steve Jobs was rushed to the hospital for a heart attack, and how the stock subsequently dropped into the toilet and bled off billions, seems to have started this fireball against citizen journalism in general. I’m seeing “told you so” reports all over the web. Only, it’s not just citizens who get things wrong.

A similar story came out a few months back, where a comedy of errors involving a Google search sent United Airlines stock down to the floor by accidentally reporting on years-old news as if it were current.

Here’s a magical truth: information isn’t always accurate. NASA once made an inches/centimeters error that cost billions. I live in Boston, where the Big Dig was loaded with mistakes, miscalculations, and billions of dollars in rework. Airplanes are off course 90+ % of the time. Most of the flight is a course correction. Practically nothing in our day is 100% accurate all the time, not even ourselves. Did you know that your body has no way to accurately report thirst, so it reports hunger, hoping that you’ll wash down the food with a drink? Your own body doesn’t accurately report things.

Let’s put down the torches and pitchforks. Citizen journalists can be inaccurate, too. The beauty of the web is that multiple news sources and communications channels hopefully help us sort this all out faster.

Photo credit, Dr. Cornelius

Thus my question: why bother tagging? Here are my thoughts on the answer:

Tags are a way of adding a layer of metadata onto something one has placed on the web. We tag photos in Flickr, for organizing, for giving labels to images, to help computers see them. We tag blog posts, songs, profile information, and all kinds of other things. Why?

In his book, Everything Is Miscellaneous, David Weinberger talks about the need for tagging growing out of an ever more complex collection of bookmarks. It became a different way to organize information. And it is. When I search through my social bookmarks, I often don’t remember the names of the sites I’m searching for. Instead, I remember the topic I came up with to remind me where to look.

This kind of folksonomy becomes useful, because it means that even if YOU call something a great “Thought Leader Program,” I might call it “weblearning,” and leave it at that. Meaning, we don’t have to agree on how to file something in a world with tags. You say to-MAY-to, and I say to-MAH-to. (Add two strips of bacn and some lettuce, and we’re a sandwich!)

Why YOU Should Tag

Helping people understand your content is important. If at all possible, spend time tagging the content you make so that others might find it in a search. Think about how THEY will look for it, and label your tags accordingly. Don’t worry so much abou how your people actually want the data. They can use del.icio.us and other tools to re-tag it their own way. But help out in a starter set.

I’m going to tag my stuff because I want to make sure I can find it again. My categories were decided long ago on my blog site, and they’re not especially helpful. My tags? Not bad.

What about you? What are you doing with tagging? How have you built your tags in the past? What are your thoughts on how they reflect on your media?

The Social Media 100 is a project by Chris Brogan dedicated to writing 100 useful blog posts in a row about the tools, techniques, and strategies behind using social media for your business, your organization, or your own personal interests. Swing by [chrisbrogan.com] for more posts in the series, and if you have topic ideas, feel free to share them, as this is a group project, and your opinion matters.

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Photo Credit, Allan Ferguson